OPINION: The man who killed Jasmyn Chan should rot in hell - seven years is not enough

James Mitchinson

ON THE night that brave Jasmyn Chan was killed by a man high on cocaine, someone was going to die at her killer’s hands. Of that, I am certain.

Unfortunately for Jazzy and her family, it was the brave 14-year-old girl whose life was cut short by a man for whom my disdain is infinite. She passed away having saved a friend from certain death, pushing them clear of what was to be her own fate.

Naseeb Ellahi, 33, described himself as a ‘cabbage’. Rotten to the core, this individual was an accident waiting to happen, having catastrophically destroyed his cognitive capabilitIes through years of drug abuse.

He could not drive sober: he had, and has no driving licence nor insurance, so for him to get behind the wheel fuelled by a mind-bending class-A drugs cocktail means that even he - ‘cabbage’ or not - must have known some harm was going to come to someone.

So how is it that a Judge can only sentence this disgusting creature to just seven-and-a-half years inside? We all know that he’ll be out in four years. Is it likely that this rotten cabbage can be transformed into something more palatable ahead of his release? Not likely. He’s confessed to having always been rotten. He always will be.

Isn’t it time the public was consulted about crime and punishment? Would people be prepared to cough up extra taxes to fund longer prison sentences? I would.

There’s a General Election coming up: wouldn’t it be nice for one of the main parties to recognise that we the right-minded, law-abiding normal man and woman on the street are fed-up of limp-wristed justice?

The police, I know, would welcome stiffer sentences. The increasingly thinner Blue Line is fed up of chasing the same offenders day after day, until they eventually wind up killing someone as their spiral of criminality inevitably reaches a demonic zenith..

And Judges are human beings, too. They have families - with little girls like Jasmyn for whom they’d do anything to protect - so surely to God they’d welcome a review of the framework within which they can operate?

I’d love to interview a circuit Judge, or perhaps one now retired to discover whether or not my instinct is correct. Perhaps one will write to me. Please do.

For now, I have to place on record that four years inside for a man who showed such disregard for all of our lives, and took away one very precious soul, is simply not enough.